What Does Biblical Perfection Mean? What Does it Not Mean?

Good afternoon, everyone. I'll pause for a moment to let my glasses unfog from my mask.

All these things we have to learn to do these days. Welcome and hello to everyone out there, all the Zoomlanders that are out there. I'm assuming you can still not see me.

Count your blessings. Hopefully everyone had a good week.

Well, one of the things that we're incredibly blessed with these days is the ability to access God's Word pretty much on demand. I would guess pretty much everyone out there has either a smartphone in their hand or in their pocket or in their car or maybe you forgot it at home and you feel like you lost your right arm. And most of you probably have the Bible on it. Not only the Bible, but pretty much every conceivable translation of the Bible that you could think to access.

And it's a blessing that we sometimes take for granted in the world today. The King James version of the Bible came into being in 1611. A lot of people actually think that was the first English translation of the Bible, but it actually followed the Geneva Bible, which was, I think, 50 to 55 years earlier. Despite the blessing of having the translation of the Bible into our own language, it's also important to understand in certain terms and words that are used in the Bible what they mean in the original language. And I'd like to focus today on one particular word in that vein. And let's start by reading the words of Jesus Christ recorded in Matthew.

And we'll look forward from there. We'll turn to Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. We'll read Matthew 5 and verse 48. Matthew 5 verse 48. Here Jesus, speaking with everyone in the Sermon on the Mount, says, you therefore must be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.

So perfection, being perfect. It's a word that's thrown out a lot in Christian circles. It's one I'm sure we've read across many times in the Bible. And as soon as we hear that English word perfect, I'm sure that a lot of things come to mind. Let's look at something that would appear to be contradictory to the idea of being perfect as Christians in Romans. Turn with me, if you will, to Romans 7 verses 14 through 19. We see that in Matthew 5, 48, we're told we must be perfect, but we look at our own lives. And if we look at with any even small degree of honesty, it's not too big of a leap to realize immediately that we are not perfect. Romans 7 verse 14. Paul put it very eloquently as he looked at his own life. Romans 7, starting verse 14, he says, we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I don't understand my own actions.

I do what I want to do. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. And if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it's good. And so it's not I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. Then he continues on in verse 19, again saying, I do not do the good I want, but the evil that I do not want is what I keep on doing. So we see an apparent contradiction being set up here in terms of the fact that we're supposed to be perfect, but even Paul, a person who wrote more of the the Bible, if you think of the human writer than anyone else did, says that he wasn't perfect.

How could we expect to be? And how could God expect us to be if it is impossible? So which one is it?

Jesus says we're to be perfect. Paul and what we observe in our own lives see that we're not.

And how is it that we're supposed to deal with that? This is what I'd like to look at today, to understand what perfection means in a biblical sense. And even before that, starting off, what it is that it does not mean as we have to unwind and think about some of these things that work their way through our lives. And before I get into the message, I do want to briefly thank Ted Budge and Elder in Southern California, whose notes I used for some of the research in this material.

So let's start with the beginning of what perfection is not. And we probably all heard the word perfectionism, and we probably all dealt with perfectionism in some way. I can tell you that as an accountant, as the son of an engineer, and somebody who grew up in a fairly strict religious tradition, perfectionism is not something that is far from me. It's something I've dealt with, I've seen, I've lived in my life in many different ways. Perfectionism is defined in psychology as a personality trait that's characterized by a person striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns also regarding other people's evaluations. One of the hallmarks of a perfectionist is a perfectionist will tend to be somebody who sees things as all or nothing, black or white, no gray. Things can only be one certain way. Do we see those things happening at times in our own lives as we look at ourselves the way that we do things, as we look at people around us and thinking, it has to be this way? Because if it's not this way, it's absolutely not right. The old, it's my way or the highway kind of a situation where we believe that our way is the only way to do things exactly right. I think back to when I lived in Denver, we lived in Denver for about 11 years and I worked downtown during the whole time that I was there and I would go from time to time to this guy who had a small business. It was in the bottom floor of an older building. It's one of these buildings where the street level had kind of gone up over the years. He'd actually walk down a half flight of steps down into his shoe shop and he had this just small shoe shop about the size maybe of a standard living room and he repaired shoes. He did a great job. He was, I would say, a perfectionist, which is one of the reasons I kept going back to him. He did great work and probably over the course of 11 years I went there maybe 15 different times and sometimes I'd stop through on my lunch hour if, you know, something had happened to the sole of a shoe or something and I needed to get it fixed.

And I'd sit there at the counter and it struck me after about the fourth or fifth time that I went there. He always had an assistant, but every time I went back he had a different assistant.

And at first it didn't make sense to me, but as I sat there one lunch hour and watched him, I began to understand why he had a different assistant every time I went into the shop.

Because you'd walk in and he had shoes everywhere. He had a couple of machines lined up on the other side of the counter that would be used for buffing. You've probably seen them. The wheels turn, it has a soft cloth on them, and you can buff the shoes. And then he'd have some stations where you could pull off the rubberized soles. You could fix soles. You could hammer in nails if you needed to.

And then he had the cash register. And it was not at all unusual. I would walk in there and he'd have his assistant. His assistant would be there buffing shoes, and he'd be at the counter working on a pair of shoes. And he'd look over his shoulder and he'd tell his assistant, go help him, go help him. And then he'd be frantically working back and forth. He was always sweating. He was always agitated. He always had one more thing to do. And then walk in and he'd take care of the customer. He'd take the shoes and he'd start buffing them. And the guy would look over next to him. He'd say, wait, wait, that's all wrong. That's all wrong.

And he would grab the shoes out of his hand. He'd say, go work on the soles over there. I'll take that. And he would take the shoes and he'd start buffing. And then somebody would come in. He'd say, go take care of the customer. And the customer would say, can I write a check? And the guy would start telling him what he needed for a check. He'd say, no, no, that's wrong. That's wrong. Here, take these shoes and buff them. And he'd run up to the front to help the customer that was trying to pay with the check. And this just went on and on. And I watched him. He was like, he's sweating.

His face would be turning red. And I just thought, this poor guy, he says he's his own worst enemy.

And he can't live through this process of his assistant trying to understand, learn, and figure out what it is that he had to do. And that's essentially a perfectionist in action. Nothing was quite right. He had to step in and do it because it wasn't being done by the other person.

In the meantime, in doing that, it was causing all this anxiety, this angst, this agitation within him.

Expecting perfection from ourselves or from others can amplify fear of failure. We all naturally, as humans, have some fear of failing. It can limit learning experiences due to unwillingness to risk something new or from the fear of not doing it perfectly. How many times have we had an opportunity to do something and we've decided, you know, I don't think I want to do that because I'm going to look foolish. I'm going to fail. I'm not going to do it right. People are going to laugh at me. I've learned that people will laugh at me anyways, so I might as well go ahead and do it.

But those things are all within us as human beings, but as we focus more and more on the perfectionism, we can stop those things from letting us go out and doing anything in the first place and start to cause feelings within us of frustration and inferiority.

The all-or-nothing thinking can be damaging, and if we spot ourselves using this style, we always have to challenge ourselves to think differently. There are particular words that people often use when they think in this perfectionist way, and we can learn to spot them not only in others but also in ourselves. As I said before, words like always and never. Words like impossible, awful, terrible, ruined, disastrous, or perfect. I was in an interesting training a couple years ago that focused on this. It focused on how do you generate ideas and become innovative.

One of the exercises they had us do, they taught us, it was a professor, I forget from what university, and there was a whole room full of us there in the training. He said, okay, you're going to go in pairs of people, and I'm going to teach you this cadence of things that you're going to have to do. It's clapping and pointing and standing up and sitting down in a certain order.

He says, I want to see how long you guys can keep going without making a mistake. He taught the pattern and he said go. Of course, it went on immediately because it was fairly complicated.

Within 10 or 15 seconds, everyone had messed up. Then he looked around the room and he said, what did you do when you messed up, when you made a mistake? He said, I'm watching you from the front, and I can tell you exactly what everybody did when they made a mistake. They put their head down and they hunkered in. They said, oh, right, with a look of pain on their face because they made a mistake. That's the way that we treat mistakes when we make them. The entire purpose of that session that he did was he said, what we're going to do is we're going to turn that on its head today, and every time you make a mistake, you're going to laugh. Then he would go through. We did several iterations of this as he'd have you do this silly little pattern of things. He said, when you make a mistake, don't get down on yourself but laugh and have fun with it.

The point of what he was doing as he got to the end of that session was to say, what we tend to do is we're so afraid of making a mistake and we just berate ourselves from making a mistake to the extent that we tend to judge things in ourselves before we even do them. In this case, we were putting it to use in a work situation. We're talking about, for example, brainstorming, putting ideas out there on how you can solve a problem. He says, one of the first mistakes that people make when they're trying to come up with ways to solve a problem is they won't put an idea up on the board because they're afraid somebody else is going to think it's dumb.

They're going to be afraid that it won't work. But when we look, even at great inventions that have been made, the Post-it note is one of the great examples, a lot of the good inventions that came to the world came as mistakes. In the Post-it note, if I remember the story right, they were trying to make a special type of adhesive, but the adhesive would never really stick right.

It would peel off easily, but it wouldn't stick right. And so it was considered a mistake until the point in time when somebody, I think they were actually using it in their church choir, they used it on some paper to stick and mark the pages in some choir music that they were singing and it turned into the Post-it note out of a mistake. So the point being that as we're trying to move forward in life, I think we know the fact that learning involves mistakes.

And so when we are so perfectionist in the way that we look at ourselves and the things that we do that we don't allow ourselves to move, to act, to learn and do those important things that have to be done for us to learn, we end up stifling our growth. There's a biblical example of this, and we're not going to read through it in detail, but I'll point it out if you want to look later, and that's in Luke 10. Luke 10 verses 38 through 42 records the story of Mary and Martha. Jesus was out teaching and Martha invited him into the house. And if you remember the story, Martha was busy getting all the food ready, getting everything done, and Mary was nowhere to be seen. She was sitting at Jesus's feet talking with him and learning from him. And Mary was so troubled by this, so she was so worked up about it, she didn't just go talk to her sister. She went to Jesus Christ and said, look at my sister over there. Can you tell her to get up and give me some help?

I'm doing all this stuff. I'm trying to get all these things ready and make it just right for you as a hostess. Can you tell her to help me? And you remember what Jesus Christ said? He said she was worried and troubled about many things, but her sister was focused on the important thing.

She was exhibiting that same trait. The intention was right. The intention was good and what she was going to do, but she got so wrapped up in what she had to do, and the fact that her sister wasn't going to help her with it, that it caused her that level of worry and anxiety, and a lack of focus on the opportunity to be there, as very few people in history have ever had, face to face in the flesh with Jesus Christ, listening to him teach.

How does perfectionism, or a wrong understanding of perfection, exhibit itself in our lives?

It's a question that's worth asking. It's certainly one that I've had to ask myself over different points in time. To use another example from work, you know, I can remember having to deal with emails, and I would get just this flood of emails, and I just couldn't get myself to respond to them. And to respond to an email would take a long, long time.

And it took me time in talking with people, and again, going through different training programs, understanding my own personality and my own makeup. I'm a highly analytical person. Analytical people tend to get caught up in the details. You get caught up in the details, and you can't move yourself forward. And I would have these emails that would sit there for days needing to be answered, but I wanted to get exactly the right answer, and it would paralyze me. And so I would set it aside, and I would procrastinate. I'd move on to other things that were easier, and then two weeks later it would be a crisis, and I had no choice but to respond, and I had to dash something out, and I'd send it off. And I had to learn how to work through that, and in my situation with highly analytical personalities, the suggestion they make is, don't make it perfect. Get it to where it's good enough, and give yourself permission to go ahead and send that out. And for me, just something that simple made a huge difference in my life. Now there are obviously much more serious ways that perfectionism can work its way through all of our lives than just evaluating and writing emails, but it's something that we should look at in the way that we look at ourselves. Certainly moving to the arena of our Christian lives, it's important as well.

How many of us feel that God is really pleased with us? You know, as we grow up, as we might have our own perfectionist tendencies, we might be in environments that have perfectionist tendencies, and let's be honest, religion overall can, when it's not properly understood, tend towards an external judgment of the things that people do, which when we misinterpret that and we apply it to ourselves, can also cause those perfectionist tendencies to come into our spiritual lives, where we focus on the things that we're doing, we focus on the things that we're not doing, and we don't focus enough on the fact that God has made promises to us, that he's forgiven us through his son Jesus Christ, that he's told us that we are his children. He calls us that right now, children that he's pleased with. How often do we, as Christians, cause that same inward pull, hanging our heads, berating ourselves, thinking that we're not good enough for God, not realizing what it is that he's done for us and what he wants for us?

Dan Bobinski, an author and training specialist in an article entitled A Cure for Perfectionism, writes this under the subsection How Perfectionism is Born. He says, many factors can contribute, but most perfection originates from our youngest years by either imprint or example. Sometimes it emerges in environments of conditional love, such as when children receive positive recognition only when they do what's supposedly perfect. People can also become perfectionists by example, such as when young children see their parents modeling perfectionist tendencies. It's worth looking back at our own lives and seeing where those things have influenced us. Sandra Wilson, author of the book Released from Shame, states that perfectionism is an unhealthy pattern of thoughts and behaviors that we ultimately use to conceal our flaws. So because we see and understand the flaws in ourselves, we try to portray everything that we can as perfectly and as flawlessly as possible, essentially as a defense mechanism. Turn with me, if you will, to Proverbs 29 verse 25.

The Bible refers to this type of behavior as fearing man because we fear what it is that others will think of us and we're afraid of what will happen when people will see us as we really are. Proverbs 29 verse 25 states, the fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe. Like many Proverbs setting up that comparison, the fear of man lays a snare, but trusting in the Lord brings safety. In his exposition of the Bible, John Gill notes that the fear of man referred to in Proverbs 29 verse 25 is as follows, quote, a fear of losing the favor and friendship of men, of not having honor and applause from them, and a fear of their reproaches and reviling. So fear that of what other people will think of you or the regard that they'll hold you in. So the clear indication is that we don't want to be perfectionists. We want to fear God and not fear man. We want to have freedom from the anxiety and insecurity that can come from perfectionist tendencies. At the same time, though, we do still see the Bible telling us we have to be perfect. So what is it we're supposed to do about it? Let's go in this second section now that we've understood a little bit about what biblical perfection is not. It's not perfectionism. But what is biblical perfection? Let's spend a few minutes looking through the Bible and understanding that a little more clearly. We'll take a look at a few of the scriptures that use the term perfect and we'll evaluate what it means. Let's start by going back to where we began in Matthew 5 verse 48. Matthew 5 verse 48. And there's a couple of things that are helpful here. One is to build context and the other is to look at the language that's used. And so to build context, we're going to start back in verse 43 of Matthew 5.

Here we read Jesus Christ saying, The Greek term that's used here in verse 48 for the word perfect is the word teleos.

It means completeness or of full age. That meaning of mature dominates most of the equivalent Greek term in the New Testament, which is telos. So something or someone can be complete or mature, but not be without flaws. We would usually think of perfection being. In fact, it's much easier to be mature and to still have flaws than it is to be without error or without flaw. Many people are mature, but few, if any, are without flaw. So we think, for example, of sports. Paul used sports analogies all the time, so I'll use a couple. Think of LeBron James. Is LeBron James a perfect basketball player? Of course not. We can all name free throws that he's missed. We can name jump shots that he's missed. Some of us are so blinded by our love for other basketball teams that we can't recognize his natural talent. We all have flaws. But the view of being a complete player is there with someone like LeBron James. The triple doubles that he has, the fact that he can shoot, he can defend, he can rebound. He has a lot of assists when he plays the game. It makes him a complete player. Nobody believes in any way that he's a perfect player. No one would ever suggest that. Nobody would ever dream that they could have a 100% field goal percentage or free throw percentage playing in the NBA. But being complete and mature as a player is a completely different thing. That's what this word, teleos, is getting to. In 1 Corinthians 2, verse 6, we'll actually start in verse 1, 1 Corinthians 2. Paul uses the term teleos again in 2, verse 6, starting in verse 1 of 1 Corinthians 2. He says, The English Standard version translates this verse a little bit differently in 1 Corinthians 2, because the word again for perfect in this passage is teleos. Yet among the mature, we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. It's a very different understanding here when we put the word mature, that meaning of maturity or completeness, into that passage. William Barkley in his daily study Bible describes teleos as follows.

So this idea of being someone who's mature, complete, having developed, and grown to the maturity that's needed. The emphasis of the verse falls more around a committed and close relationship with God. And so when we look to Matthew 5, 48, it's talking about love, it's talking about mirroring that love and having that same ability, being as mature in our ability to express love as God the Father is. There's a second Greek word that's translated as perfect in the New Testament, and we can find that one in 2 Corinthians 13. 2 Corinthians 13 and in verse 11. 2 Corinthians 13, 11. Here Paul, closing his letter to the Corinthians, says, finally, brethren, farewell, be perfect. Be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace, and the God of love and peace shall be with you. Now the Greek word in this passage for perfect is a different word, which is katartizo.

katartizo. According to the NAS Greek lexicon, this term has the following meanings.

1. To mend, like mending something that's been broken or torn, to repair or to complete.

2. To fit out, equip, put in order, arrange or adjust, to fit or frame for oneself, or to prepare. 3. Or, in an ethical context, to strengthen, complete, or make one what he or she ought to be. So in translating this scripture, the English Standard Version renders it as follows.

Finally, my brothers rejoice. Aim for restoration. Comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. So the idea here of perfection, as it was translated in English, meaning to mend, to restore, to equip, to strengthen.

Again, something that we know as we think about our Christian lives, that we are to be about.

Much easier, much different connotation than simply saying be perfect.

In fact, the situations we get into, we need to seek to mend, to restore, to bring together, to heal wounds. A third term that's translated in the New Testament as perfect can be found in 2 Timothy 3. It's in 2 Timothy 3, 17, and we'll begin one verse earlier in verse 16.

2 Corinthians 3, 16 starts, All scripture is given by inspiration of God. It's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished, to all good works. The Greek word for the term perfect in this verse is arteos. Arteos is defined as being fitted to bringing to an end or to make complete, also in context as having a special aptitude for given uses. The English Standard Version renders verse 17 as this, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Think of it in terms of a fine craftsman or an artisan who's able to use his tools in a masterful way to practice his or her trade. I think back to when Solomon's Temple was being built, and the Bible talks about specific craftsmen that had been given aptitudes by God in working with gold or silver or with wood and how they were to be used to build the temple so they could bring it that beauty. And when you see a fine craftsman at work, he or she with the tools is able to do this incredible work that would be impossible for us to do until we've spent the hours upon hours learning to do it.

And that's the idea of perfection in terms of this word of arteos, being suited for that fine skill. And that implies all of the time that it takes to grow, to learn, and to develop those aptitudes. So these are the three words that are used that really lay out what perfection means within the Bible, which is completeness, maturity, mending, being one who restores, being fully equipped, and demonstrating an aptitude for our Christian vocation. You know, as I was going through this, I was thinking back on an experience I had probably six years ago, so ago, and it was another work situation.

Our office sponsored a golf outing, and as entertainment for this golf outing, after everyone had gone golfing, they had a person come in who was one of these golf trick shot people. And I don't know if you've seen them, but they do these crazy wacky shots, you know, using three-foot-long putters to tee off and hit the ball a couple hundred yards and all these tricks. And so this guy came up, and I don't remember his name anymore, but he's been on ESPN and kind of at the top of the golf trick shot circuit. And he got out this driver, and he just started pounding the ball farther than Tiger Woods could ever think of driving a ball.

And I remember watching him, and some of us were talking and saying, how does a guy who hits the ball like this straight and long, and then he gets out this putter, and he whacks away at the ball with a putter, and he can still drive it 250 yards with a putter off the tee? And we think, you know, how does a guy like this not become one of the greatest golfers in the world? And actually one of my colleagues had been in a foursome with this guy earlier in the day golfing. He was, you know, I asked him that exact question.

And what it turned out this guy said is, you know, I never developed a complete game. I was always good at driving the ball, and I could drive the ball far and accurately. And this guy played with him, said it's on every hole. He drove the ball, and he was within 10 to 20 yards of the tee. But in order to be a top-notch golfer, you got to not only get close to the pin, you got to get the ball in the hole.

And that means you've got to be able to chip, and you've got to be able to putt. And as this guy was talking to one of my colleagues at work, he said, you know, I just never got the short game down. I could drive the ball, I could get close to the green, but in order to compete at the level that people compete in the PGA, you've got to be able to chip the ball up on the green very accurately, and you've got to be able to hit your putts.

He said, I just never could do it. And so he had this incredible drive. He could outdrive anybody that you would run into. He could outdrive any professional golfer. But he didn't have a complete game. In that sense, if we're going to use the word as it's used in the Bible, he was not perfect. He didn't have a game that was fully suited to play at the level that he ultimately had wanted to play. He made a good living for himself, doing shows and things on the trick shot circuit.

But he didn't have the completeness in order to be able to compete at the level that he had originally wanted to. So I think that idea of completeness, maturity, and continuing to move on to that is what we need to hold in our minds as we're thinking about the biblical view of perfection.

So let's go to the last section, then, of this message and simply ask the question, where do we go from here? What is it that we're supposed to do? So we understand that perfectionism, the idea that we've got to be perfect, we can't possibly show anybody a flaw, that God's not going to love us unless we do everything right, we know that that's not what Christianity is about. God didn't call us to be on a guilt trip. He called us to become more like him every day. He called us to be complete, to be fully outfitted, as we heard, to be mature, to build our skills in practicing the Christian vocation. So what is it that we're supposed to do?

Well, you know, when we look at physical growth, we kind of intuitively understand that growth is something that's just a part of nature and things that are created. We don't plant a tree in our front yard in the springtime and expect that two months later we're going to have a 50-foot shade tree that we can go out and have picnics underneath. We just know it doesn't work that way. In fact, we realize it'll probably take decades before a tree like that is going to reach full maturity until it's fully suited for what we planted that tree to do. And that's really the way that God looks at us. And if we look at examples in the Bible, we can see quickly that what God is looking for and what he rewards is that continuing ongoing growth that we're planted and growing and developing. Turn with me, if you will, to Hebrews 6. This idea of continuing to grow and develop stands in contrast to the perfectionist attitude. Remember we talked about how you tend to hunker down, you get paralyzed, you don't want to make a move because you're afraid of making a mistake. But that's not how growth happens. Hebrews 6 verse 1, here again we see the word perfection. We're going to read the English Standard Version, which says in Hebrews 6 verse 1, therefore let us leave the elementary doction of Christ to go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith towards God.

There's a sense of motion here. We are to go on to maturity. It's a process that we're continuing to travel down. There's a road that we're traveling. There's a direction that we're moving.

Paul states it more poetically in 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 13.

We know this as the love chapter. Remember, as a child, my mom making us memorize this chapter.

And it's funny, even as a little kid, I was always struck by the poetry of verse 11 of 1 Corinthians 13. I think it's so appropriate as we think about this topic. 1 Corinthians 13. When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. It's a fantastic way, I think, of putting it. It puts it right at the heart of the love chapter, which is talking about how we go on to spiritual maturity, understanding the love of God. And it's likening it to how we are as children versus how we are as full-grown adults. And it's emphasizing that process. If we see a five-year-old sitting down and five-year-old boys playing with his Batman figurine or Pokemon cards back in the days when my son was little, whatever it is that young children play with, that's pretty neat and they have fun doing it. Now, if you see a 26-year-old sitting back and he's got his Batman figurine and he's bouncing it around, your first thought is going to be, there's something wrong here. This person is not thinking as a 25-year-old. And that's exactly the point that it's making. As we're dealing with God's Word, as we're understanding his way, we're on this road of maturity.

It's not a destination. It's something we continue to move on. As we know as human beings, even, we physically mature, but emotional maturity is not a guarantee for us, is it? And all of us struggle with elements of that as we learn to grow up and develop, as life knocks us around as Christians, as we have trials, and we learn how to better depend on God and use his Holy Spirit, and we move towards maturity. And that's the one thing that we have to do in order to develop this biblical element of perfectionist completeness, is always be on the move towards it.

Let me draw at this point a bit by going back to where we started. We looked at Matthew 5.48, we built a little more context around Matthew 5.48, and I want to pull a lens out just a little bit farther. And let's start now in Matthew 5 verse 17 and get even the fuller context of the Sermon on the Mount and what it was that Jesus Christ was talking about here. In Matthew 5 verse 17, Jesus begins, or partway into the Sermon on the Mount, says, Do not think that I came to destroy the law of the prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. Now, fulfill is a different Greek word, Thayer's Greek lexicon. It's a word pli-ruo, which can mean to render full, to complete, to perfect or consummate, to make complete in every particular, to render perfect. It does not mean to invalidate or to render irrelevant, but to rather bring to its fullness. And before going into specific examples farther down in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus notes in verse 20, I say to you that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. So he said he was there to fulfill, as it was translated, the law, and that our righteousness should exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. And they were people at that time that were seated as exceedingly righteous because of the things that they did, their ability to understand God's law, the finer points of what people were told through the Old Testament scriptures to do and to not do, and to adhere to them in a very specific way. Now the passages that follow, after verse 20, go through, and commentators and we in the church have often talked about it as Jesus Christ magnifying the law. And he goes through, and there are different paragraphs, you have heard it said, you shall not murder. You have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery. We've read some of that in the sermonette earlier today, and we talk about the fact that Jesus Christ magnified the law because he's pointing out to these things that were laid out in the Old Testament scriptures and saying, not only should you not murder, you should not hate your brother. But what struck me as I was preparing for this sermon was that maybe this implication of Jesus Christ magnifying the law at this point in the Sermon on the Mount is not quite accurate. Now why do I say that? I say that because Jesus Christ, we know before he came to earth, was there with God. He was there interacting with people in the Old Testament. And in fact, the things that are written in the Bible are a reflection of what's in the mind of God and Jesus Christ. And so what I would maintain is that Jesus Christ was not at this point magnifying the law. What Jesus Christ was doing was explaining the original intent of the law. Why were these things laid down? Why were these things put out there for human beings to do? Because they were a reflection of the larger picture, the larger view, the larger approach that lives within God and Jesus Christ. And that's how it is that you can achieve maturity.

That's how it is that you can be more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees, is to understand not just the words that were put down, the things that you should do and not do, but to understand a larger picture of what it is that God is trying to achieve, his mind, and how that needs to live through us. And when we look down through these later verses, we see exactly how it is that that works. Now think of it maybe as an example as a parent teaching a child. So one example I could think of is we teach our children to save. So what do we do? We give them a piggy bank maybe. And we say, I'm going to give you an allowance and every week give you a dollar allowance, but you got to take 10 cents and put it in the piggy bank. Now what are we trying to teach the child? Now if we take a letter of the law type of approach, we've taught that child every dollar you get put 10 cents in the piggy bank. So are we really expecting that this child at age 40 will have this monstrous piggy bank in the living room that's filled with dimes? Of course not! What are we trying to do? We're trying to teach a child the importance of saving, the fact that you shouldn't spend every dollar that you get. The fact that money has value and part of the value that we use that money for is planning for the future, not just consuming it in the present. And so we understand we teach our children save 10 cents out of every dollar, whatever it might be, that exactly what we're telling them to do is not ultimately what it is that we want to build into them as a habit or as an attribute. It's a subcomponent of it. It's a piece of it. It's an elementary piece that they can understand at that age or maturity. And as they move on, they continue to do more and expand on that. We give our kids a curfew. Do expect that when our children are 40, 50 years old, that they're going to come home at 10 o'clock and get in bed because we've taught them that as their curfew? Of course not!

We teach them to get in at a reasonable time because you have to balance your priorities in life. Your social life does not take over all of the other priorities. You need to make sure you have enough energy to get the things done that you need to in life. And that's why we teach those things. And that's the same thing, essentially, that Jesus Christ was laying out in this section.

And what he's doing is he's starting to say, yes, these things were written in the Old Testament as commandments. And they have a much bigger meaning in terms of why they are there because they're an expression of the mind of God. And they're meant to take us onto this pathway. This pathway of a greater and fuller understanding of what it is that God wants from a mature Christian.

Something that can't be done simply by trying to adhere to individual words of individual commandments. So he goes through this whole section. Verse 21, he talks about murder.

We know that we can't stand before God and say, you know, I'm a righteous person because I didn't murder anybody. I think no serious Christian would say that the standard of Christianity is making sure in your whole lifetime that you do not murder someone. And that's exactly what he's saying in this passage when he starts saying, not only should you not murder, but you've got to understand that hatred for someone else, this feeling of bitterness that comes up towards another person, is the root that drives in some people murder. But it's sin long before you take the step of actually trying to take somebody else's life. In verse 27 and on, he talks about adultery. Again, is the standard that we stand before God and say, I never committed adultery with someone. He lays out the fact that there's so much more to it. And look, we know in our lives, you know, with the internet and everything else, there's access to all of these great things and also terrible things that we can open the door to. And what he's saying here is there's a lot more behind this. There are many things that come many steps before you would ever consider committing adultery that are sinful because they involve lust. They involve acting on that lust and they're taking you in a direction that goes other than that stream of God's will. And he goes on and talking about taking God's name in vain, walking the extra mile, and then in the last section that we read before, showing love to all, whether or not they show love to you. And that's where he finally makes that statement that we're supposed to be telios, complete and mature. All of these things that came in between are examples and showing ways that we are to become complete as Christians. And I think at the core of that is really understanding what it is that God's word does. It puts us on the right path. We have to continue to walk down that path. It's not a matter of learning a certain number of commands that we follow and then saying we've checked off that formula and we're done with the job. So as we move forward in our Christian lives, this understanding of our goal of maturity and completeness and fitness for purpose has to end up driving us in every fiber of our beings as we go forward. What we want to do then as mature Christians is to model God and his way of doing things in everything that we're doing. We're essentially on a one-way road.

We're told that anyone putting his hand to the plow and looking back is not fit for the kingdom.

And this is why. Because we're on this road to maturity. And just like, you know, people will sometimes say, and I never understand these people, you'll see them on TV sometimes, they'll say, oh boy, if I could only be back in high school, and I'll lose a special amount of five people up on the panel who wish they were back in high school. And it's just, it's an unnatural thing to see somebody in their 40s stand up in front of an audience and say, boy, I just wish I was in high school again because I could be the popular kid or whatever.

We can't move backwards in that level of maturity, and that's the way it is for us as Christians as well.

So as we conclude on this topic, hopefully this reflection on the idea of perfection has been a useful one. I know for me, as I was going through the topic just for myself, it was incredibly useful.

We've seen how perfectionism, while something we all struggle with to some degree or another, has to be abandoned as a benchmark that we use not only to judge ourselves but to judge the worth of other people.

We've seen how the Bible defines the perfection that God intends for us through the word teleos, becoming mature and complete, cattartizo, to be one who mends things that are broken, who restores, and artios, to become fully equipped for our Christian vocation. And we've seen how this is an ongoing process to which we all have to continue to recommit every day as we seek to understand that greater mind that God has, that mind and that purpose that sits behind the commandments that he gave, that sits back behind the stories that we read about how God dealt with people over the course of time. Now, I always like to try to end things up with some concrete recommendations. So what I'm going to do this time is just recommend a few things to read, things that I'll commit to you that I'm going to read again and further in the upcoming week as well. But if this is a topic that's interested you even to a little level, I would recommend three readings over the course of this coming week and to spend some time thinking through them in this context of perfectionism, godly perfection, completeness, and maturity. The first one is Matthew 5 verses 17 through 48. We spent some time on that today, but I'd recommend that I will myself go back to Matthew 5 verses 17 through 48 to give it some more time and thought. The second is 1 Corinthians 13. I think really reading 1 Corinthians 13 and internalizing it is incredibly important because it strips down all of the things that God is trying to accomplish and tells us that faith, hope, and love lie at the core of everything that he's trying to do. It doesn't mean the other things are unimportant, but it means that that's what is at the core of what he's trying to accomplish and makes us think of that. So that's number two. The third reading I would recommend, and this is actually where this sermon started, is the book of James. I was listening to a bit of a commentary on the book of James, and it talked about the fact that perfection is mentioned, I think, six or seven times in the book of James. And there are probably as many different thoughts on the reason for the book of James and the organization of it as there are commentators, but I found it interesting. This commentator talked about James as being a series of vignettes that are all focused on how we become whole and complete Christians, people who don't just believe something and say they believe it, but who live out the things that they believe in the things that they do. And so James is really a focus on how is it that you become that complete, full, mature Christian. I'd recommend that, and we'll also be turning there in this upcoming week. So as we go forward, I hope this brief thought around the idea of biblical perfection and what it means, and importantly what it doesn't mean, has been helpful, and would encourage everyone to continue on that road of being full, complete, and mature in Jesus Christ.